OMFG.
“You rarely know what’s going to turn up on one of those wacky Spanish talk shows, but in no way were we expecting this. This man has trained his dog to dance, and we mean really dance. As the caption on Live Leak’s website puts it, “this dog dances better than you.” (via Huffington Post)
Too bad the show Dexter is in a bit of a decline, because my girlfriend & I had a killer costume this halloween ;-)
Caterina Fake’s recipe for a focused, productive day. Very cool (and very nicely designed). I wish I had the self-discipline to implement this, but both the nature of my job and the way my mind spins hold me back.
——————
singletasking (via caterina)
As a startup, Vark.com is doing a lot of interesting things. I really dig their IM interface, the breadth of ways they store, share, & answer questions, the interesting statistics regarding “median time to answer” and other fun facts about how well the service is humming.
Ultimately, though, it has a single fatal flaw: it fails to provide personal value to the nucleus of expert users that provide value to the wider user-base.
Josh Porter (aka Bokardo) explains this problem succinctly in a post title “The Delicious Lesson”:
The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary.
Vark.com fails to provide experts any lasting and meaningful value… “Why should I spend my time and energy answering these questions?”
This isn’t unrecoverable. Vark could provide experts value in the form of notoriety by ‘scoring’ their contributions and providing a category leader-board, appealing to their ego or compulsion to beat the ‘game’.
Perhaps there is some other clever offering, but the lesson is: there has to be something.
